…but before I get into the exact reason why, I want beg and plead with you to share this post with everyone you know. Post it all over Facebook, Tweet the crap out of it… I really want to give United Airlines a fat black eye for their unfairness and idiocy.

The short of the story is this:

My girlfriend flew into Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on Christmas Eve. She originally had a return flight for Monday, January 4th.

While she was home, on New Year’s Eve, her grandfather passed away. His funeral was on Sunday, January 3rd, his burial the following day. Because of this unexpected change of events/family tragedy, she contacted the airline and changed her return flight to Tuesday, January 5th. Her flight was to leave O’Hare around 7AM.

The fee to change the date was around $120, which was good because she was eligible for a one-time bereavement refund of up to $150. In the end, pushing the flight back one day wouldn’t cost her anything.

Last night, around midnight, she decided to check her itinerary to see which terminal she was flying out of seven hours later. That’s when she noticed that the ticket agent who rescheduled her flight had rescheduled it for February 5th, not January 5th.

No big deal, right? Wrong.

She immediately called the airline to get it corrected since it was clearly an error on their part. First they told her there were no seats available for the 7AM flight. Then they magically “found” one, and told her if she wanted to reschedule her now-February 5th return flight, that it would cost $200 to do so.

After arguing with them for half an hour that the mistake was their fault and that she shouldn’t have to pay extra for their error, she reluctantly agreed to the additional fee. Except that when she finally agreed to United Airlines’ clear use of extortion, they told her that the ticket had now gone up to $366.

So in the end, she would have paid over $300 for her original round-trip flight, a $120 rescheduling fee for an incorrect date, and an additional $366 to fix a mistake they themselves made.

And keep in mind that we’re talking about a rescheduling that had to occur because of a death in the family. The term “compassion” is clearly not in vocabulary of United Airlines.

United Airlines definitely isn’t winning any customer service awards anytime soon. Funny, because if you hop on over to their website they have a laughable “Customer Commitment/Promise” section that outlines just how committed they are to their customers. I didn’t see “Screwing Over Grieving Family Members” anywhere on their twelve-item list. They must have left that one off.

So if you’re thinking about flying with United, don’t.

In the end, my girlfriend bought a one-way ticket with Southwest that was cheaper than anything United was offering. Still, if anyone is interested in a one-way ticket from Chicago to Los Angeles on February 5th, let me know, because there’s no way in hell that we’re ever setting foot on another United Airlines airplane ever again.